


counting bullet wounds

by Anniely



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Baking, M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Original Character(s), Stars, off screen death of a child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-21 17:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18706987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anniely/pseuds/Anniely
Summary: It is only after Finch meets John – Mr. Reese – meets this man like a scalpel, that he comes to realize that being whole does not mean being undamaged, but rather to be held together by something other than his own skin, his own two arms





	counting bullet wounds

John fell through the glass ceiling of a swimming pool once and dragged himself back to the library, clothes clinging to his body with water and blood.

 

When Finch peeled them off, as carefully as he could, he found a myriad of tiny cuts, glass fragments and old bullet wounds, like small, pale suns, splattered across John’s skin.

 

He could have made a star chart from them, drawing lines between them with his fingertip.

 

He’s the reason for some of those marks, he knows; he’ll never forget. He doesn’t believe this kind of guilt could ever be hidden underneath layers of white gauze, no matter how much he wishes for it.

 

* * *

 

A small trail of blood drops leads to a corner of the library where John, his jacket haphazardly thrown onto the floor, his shirt half cut away from his body is sitting on an expensive, and probably antique, wooden desk. He’s looking entirely too happy for someone who has just been in a shoot-out in an abandoned fish tinning factory with ten heavily armed mobsters and managed to narrowly avoid death by lead poisoning ("The third time this month, Mr. Reese!") only because of a malfunction in the wiring of the electric fence.

 

Finch has the desk lamp turned upwards, its light shining directly into an abstract piece of art: deep dark reds on skin. He is methodically cleaning the wound, his hands not trembling anymore like they did in the beginning when the blood would make his head spin and his breath come out in shallow gulps.

 

"It’s usually not a good sign when you’re this quiet, Harold," John says softly, as Finch gets outs his suture needle, like he can feel the heavy weight that settles in Finch’s stomach whenever John gets hurt.

 

"I am merely trying to make sure that your wound doesn’t scar," Finch gives back, squinting at the needle; he has become good at the motions needed to make perfect loops and knots, but he will never be comfortable being the one to stitch someone else back together. It’s too close, somehow, too intimate.

 

"One more really doesn’t matter, Finch," John says and grins at him. It’s not quite so rare these days to see him happy, even though the open, lighthearted smiles are usually reserved for the seclusion of the library, for the old books and dust and, for some reason, Finch. "I’m not that vain."

 

"Says the man who takes ten minutes in the bathroom to get his hair to lie _just right_."

 

Finch tightens the last knot and straightens his aching back and neck, then puts away the needle and thread, dropping bloody cotton swabs into the bin. He watches John spread antiseptic cream over the tear in his side.

 

* * *

 

Back at the beginning, John gently took the medical supplies from Finch’s shaking hands (when they shake now, it’s for an entirely different reason) and stitched himself back together with a nonchalant kind of indifference, as if the pain didn’t matter, as if him being hurt didn’t matter.

 

It makes Finch throat close up even now, to think that John considers himself to be so replaceable that his health is something no one would need to be concerned about.

 

* * *

 

"Allow me," Harold says, and lays a piece of gauze over the suture as gently as he can. He used to take care of injured birds that his father would sometimes bring home; he can be very gentle.

 

He follows the lines of old scars with his eyes, as he wraps a bandage around John’s torso, trying to hold him together like the metal screws in his neck hold his own bones together. To be broken, and broken anew, and not fall apart; Finch doesn’t understand it. He dreads the day John will be hurt beyond anything he could stitch back together.

 

The bandage is secured with a long piece of adhesive tape and Finch steps back to take last look at his handiwork.

 

"Thank you, Finch," John says, flexing the muscles in his back.

 

"You are quite welcome, Mr. Reese. Although I wish I didn’t have to do this quite so frequently."

 

"I told you I could do it myself."

 

* * *

 

This is John Reese: a man who would walk to the edge of the world and jump, for what he believes is right, for other people; who bleeds because he cares; who is held together by pain and loyalty.

 

Finch doesn’t bleed anymore, he only aches, deep down in his bones, where everything and everyone he ever loved sits and weights him down and holds him together at the same time.

 

* * *

 

Finch turns away, briefly rubbing his shoulder; it feels as if something is burning its way through the bones there.

 

"That’s not what I meant," he says. He didn’t even realize that there was blood under his fingernails. He picks at it distractedly.

 

"Harold."

 

John’s hand is suddenly on Finch’s elbow, just there, not really holding, but Finch stops anyway; a moon being pulled in by a planet. His mind stills for a second, as the warmth from John’s fingers creeps through the layers of clothing Finch puts between himself and anybody else (himself and himself? Is that possible?).

 

"It’s not your fault that I got hurt. It’s never your fault."

 

Finch grits his teeth so hard he can feel his jaw crack; these days, he substitutes pain for tears.

 

"It’s always my fault, Mr. Reese. I send you out there. _I_ gave you this job."

 

He keeps his face turned away from John’s eyes. John, he has found, has the uncanny talent to make his heart stutter and his voice falter if he looks at him for too long, with too much understanding and gentle sympathy in his eyes.

 

Finch is sure he doesn’t in any way deserve either.

 

"And I accepted it."

 

The hand on Finch’s elbow tightens the tiniest bit, cutting Finch off before he can reply.

 

"You saved my life," John says and he says it like he means it.

 

Finch almost believes him.

 

"And now I risk it every single day as if it means nothing."

 

A statement, not a question. Finch has done a great many things in his life that he regrets, some of them illegal, some something else (is there an appropriate word for leaving your father in his own head, in a world he doesn’t remember anymore?).  
But nothing has ever felt so wrong as sending a good man out to die, day after day, waiting not for him to return but for the day when he no longer will.

 

"We save people, Finch."

 

"At what cost?" He finally shakes John’s hand off and turns to face him; it might be the bravest thing he has ever done (his elbow still feels warm and he puts his own hand there, as if he can hold on – to what, he doesn’t know). "At what cost and for what reason? The pursuit of some aloof kind of justice which is inevitably going to kill us?"

 

John gets off the table, dried blood still clinging to his skin (Finch can smell the blood, taste it on the tip of his tongue). There’s a rare, tired heaviness in his movements.

 

They are standing in the middle of the room, in the dim light that paints everything into desaturated colors, with only a few feet of distance between them. It feels like nothing to Finch and it scares him (Harold wonders, sometimes, in the middle of the night, if there is anything that makes John shake and tremble and then he is equal parts relieved and disappointed that he doesn’t know).

 

"I would have been dead a long time ago, Harold. But you saved my life," John says again, his hand finding Finch’s elbow again. He doesn’t seem to realize that he’s trapped Finch’s own hand under his larger one. Finch doesn’t have the heart to tell him.

 

"You cared when it mattered. That’s why we do this, because we care, because we want to show those people that they’re not alone, that they’re not irrelevant. And that matters."

 

Finch speaks five languages fluently and a number of others well enough to get by; there are no words, he has found, for John Reese.

 

"Forgive me, Mr. Reese," Finch says finally and it feels as if all the muscles in his body are relaxing at the same time; he would crumble to his knees if it wasn’t for John’s hand holding him up. "I keep forgetting that between us you are by far the better man."

 

* * *

 

Finch falls asleep on his desk that night, his glasses digging into his cheek, his hand closed tightly around the remains of John’s shirt.

 

When John comes into the library the next morning, with Bear on his heels and breakfast in his hands, Finch is rubbing at the marks on his skin and John doesn’t comment on his ruined shirt lying across Finch’s lap.

 

He makes a point, however, of letting his fingers slide along Harold’s for just a moment as he hands over the cup of sencha green tea he brought.

 

* * *

 

When John was nineteen, he killed a man for the first time. As he watched blood seep into the hot sand, he imagined he could see a crowd standing around the dead man’s body, silently judging John for choosing his own life over someone else’s.

 

He tried to count the lives he’s taken and balance them against the lives he’s saved, but the two sides never really even out, and there are lost lives that seem heavier than others, and saved ones that almost make John believe that he could be a good man (in another life, maybe).

 

* * *

 

It’s a sunny day and the weather seems to mock them both as they are standing in their dark suits at the edge of the wide law, watching people mill around a small pit where a child is being hidden away under wood and earth and flowers.

 

It’s hardly the first funeral either of them has attended; they don’t speak about it, but the intimate understanding of death they both have is evident and obvious to the other one. Just as their wish to save and protect hangs invisibly between them, tethering them together.

 

Finch grips Bear’s leash tightly and John wants to take his hand and uncurl the tense fingers. He doesn’t move. It’s like he can feel the sadness radiating off Finch; he wants to comfort, but he doesn’t know how. He can’t even comfort himself.

 

"You will die and I won’t even know your name," Finch suddenly says, apropos of nothing, and then turns away just as suddenly.

 

His limp, as he walks away from John, seems worse than usual; it often does when there is something weighting Finch down, keeping him at his computers until the early morning hours when he rubs and rubs at his face as if there is something there that just won’t come off.

 

John stays.

 

His mother, when she was home from overseas, always wore a delicate, golden cross around her neck. John never had much use for a god. This, however, feels like a kind of penance (not enough, never enough).

 

* * *

 

They are sitting next to each other in a small coffee shop, Bear, his head on his paws, at their feet, unattended cups of coffee cooling in front of them.

 

There’s much to say, probably, and John feels the silence settle heavy between them. He doesn’t know how to comfort; he knows how to kill and protect and stitch back together crudely. It’s Finch, whose fingerprints are on his side and his back, who knows how to say things that make people feel, that sway people.

  
John doesn’t know how to comfort, but he knows how to trust.

 

"My name is John Adams."

 

* * *

 

His name is Brian and he’s seven and John is too late. He saves Brian’s mother, but by the time he and Finch realize that Brian’s father is after his son as well, it’s already too late.

 

John has heard men die, drown in their own blood, gasp for air, grasp for the last threads of life, but he has never heard anything so horrible as a mother crying for her son, hunched over his lifeless, too small and too cold body.

 

And John is only one man, one man with one gun, one friend (maybe two) and one dog, and despite his absolute willingness to give his life for everybody else – some people can’t be saved, no matter how much they might deserve it.

 

* * *

 

Finch startles out of the staring contest with his cold coffee and looks at John over the top of his glasses which have slid down his nose.

 

"Like the second president?" he finally asks, resting his elbows on the table, his hands folded together as if in prayer (and maybe he is). He should tell John not to give him this piece of himself as well, not after everything else he’s already given, but Finch is feeling selfish, and lonely; he won’t refuse this offer of trust and closeness.

 

John nods.

 

"Yes," he says and smiles, a barely-there-and-already-gone smile that Finch can’t help but treasure. "My father was a college professor for American History. My full name’s John Henry Adams. Henry after my grandfather."

 

"Would you – prefer I not call you Mr. Reese?"

 

John’s smile stays on his lips longer, this time.

 

"John Adams died a long time ago. For some reason, John Reese was saved."

 

* * *

 

When Finch was four years old – when Harold was four years old, he already knew how to read and write, even though his letters were a little blocky and often more than a little lopsided. He knew how to add and subtract, how to multiply and divide and he could also recognize more than fifteen different birds by their call alone. He did not, however and much to his father’s chagrin, have any patience for or any interest in fishing whatsoever; on days when his father left for the nearby lake before first light, Harold and his mother would end up in the kitchen, baking up a storm. His mother, a chef de pâtissier in a big hotel before she met his father and moved out into the middle of nowhere, Idaho, would teach him how to make eclairs and cookies and cakes and other sweet treats and while his natural talent for numbers and letters didn’t quite extend to his icing skills, he still cherished these hours with his mother as much as he did the times when his father allowed him to help with the taxes.

 

His mother died when he was seven years old and Harold baked a cake for her WAKE that was slightly lopsided and a little overdone, but when his father saw it, he smiled for the first time in five days.

 

* * *

 

Finch rolls the name around in his head, in his mouth, tasting it like he used to taste his mother’s sugar cookies – from the outside in. He knows that was he has just been given is exceptional; a gift he’s not sure he deserves.

 

"I – thank you, Mr. Reese," he finally says. It feels inadequate, but he hopes that John, like so often, knows what he is really saying, what he means.

 

"Anytime, Finch," John says and takes their coffee cups to dispose of them in a trashcan a few steps away.

 

For all that he is sitting down, Finch feels as if he is suddenly on shaky ground, like something has shifted.

 

* * *

 

The numbers still keep coming, tangos and foxtrots in tinny voices, despite Brian’s death. Finch spends most of his day at the library, sitting at his computers. John goes out and comes home bruised sometimes, but successful more often than not.

 

Finch watches him, the easy way he moves, how he pets Bear, how he always finds time to speak to the homeless people he encounters, how he brings Finch tea most mornings and suddenly Finch wants, he yearns – he doesn’t know exactly what for.  
John almost trips over Bear as he walks into the library, the dog winding around his legs like a cat, and his face breaks out into a smile as he pushes Bear out of the way gently, always so gentle. The smile makes the corners of his eyes crinkle and Finch looks at him, the man in the suit who he pays to protect people and also to hurt them, sometimes, if necessary, and he all he can think is ‘Oh’.

 

* * *

 

Over the course of their work together, Finch has come to realize that there are very, very few things (he could count those things on one hand and still have fingers to spare) that he would not do for the other man.

 

Because this is John.

 

This is _John_.

 

* * *

 

It takes him an embarrassing three weeks to figure out what to do – what he wants to do (and maybe a little what he can bring himself to do). He has already bought John a flat, he doubts he’d want another one, and John has a standing appointment with Finch’s tailor once a month to replace all the suits he has ruined in the pursuit of their numbers.

 

One evening, when he is standing in the small bodega around the corner from tonight’s safehouse, looking at his milk choices, he suddenly knows what he will do.

 

Finch walks out of the store with two bulging plastic bags, trying to remember the exact baking time for his mother’s favorite recipe.

 

He spends a frenzied night mixing and rolling out dough and cutting out cookies, hopped up on adrenaline and Cup Noodles like he hasn’t been since college, staying up the whole night, hunched over a keyboard, frantically getting out code, brain working faster than his fingers could.

 

Around four, he falls asleep for a short hour, just lies down on his bed in his clothes, the scent of warm sugar cookies surrounding him like an embrace.

 

* * *

 

Freshly showered and dressed in another suit, Finch walks out the townhouse the next morning, a plate covered with cling film safely in both hands, glad that Bear spent the night at John’s so he doesn’t have to juggle the dog’s leash, too.

 

All the payphones he passes stay silent.

 

At the library, where he arrives before John as always, he puts the plate on his desk, safely away from the edges where overeager dogs might accidentally push them off. He turns on all his monitors and tries to focus on the coding project he started a few weeks before, some of it for fun, some of it for one of his various cover personas (he will have to put in a bug or two before he turns those over to his supervisors, though). The pitter-patter of paws announces John’s imminent arrival just as Finch has finally managed to become immersed in the lines of code.

 

He wipes off his suddenly clammy palms on his trousers and turns his chair to welcome Bear, who makes a beeline for him, tongue lolling out of his mouth in a doggy grin. The Belgian Malinois lets himself be thoroughly pet before walking over to his water bowl and then sprawling onto the blanket they put next to Finch’s desk for him. John leash dangling from his right hand, watches them with a small smile tugging on the edges of his mouth.

 

"Morning, Finch," he says, when their eyes meet.

 

"I – good morning, Mr. Reese," Finch gives back. He hasn’t stumbled over his words in a long time; he hasn’t been this invested in finding the right thing to say in a long time.

 

"Did someone bake?" John asks, nodding toward the plate, the iced sugar cookies clearly visible through the transparent cling film.

 

"I did – yes."

 

"I didn’t know you could bake, Finch."

 

Finch did not, he has to admit (and it seems negligent in retrospective), think further than ‘bake cookies, give them to John and hope that would be enough – hope that would say enough’. But now that he is here, looking at John, he feels more lost than ever.

 

The cookies suddenly seem small and inconsequential.

 

John steps closer and, after looking to Finch for permission, peels off the cling wrap to take a round cookie with azure blue icing. He takes a bite without taking his eyes off Finch (it takes his breath away).

 

Then he smooths the cling film back into place and, still looking at Finch with such soft eyes, asks: "Is this what you have been worrying about these past couple of weeks?"

 

Of course John realized; of course John _saw_.

 

Finch rubs at his neck, that small place where the pain sits, then realizes what he is doing and drops his hand.

 

"Ah, yes. I suppose it was."

 

"Harold," John says, his voice gentle and strong and Finch delights in hearing his name coming from John’s lips, "I’ve been yours since you had me kidnapped and tied up." And then, because at heart his man in a suit is a little shit, he adds, "Best first date I ever had."

 

A truth, presented so simply, so incontrovertible that it takes Finch’s breath away.

 

John tastes like icing sugar when he kisses him.

 

* * *

 

Finch is tracing the scars in John’s back, reveling in the fact that he is finally allowed to touch. He draws imaginary lines between them, drawing as many constellations onto John’s skin as he can remember, painting the stars onto John’s body.

 

"What are you doing, Harold?" John asks, his voice deeper than usual, his body perfectly still.

 

"Orion," Finch says, as he draws. "Ursa Major. Ursa Minor. Cassiopeia. Hercules."

 

"You made that last one up," John accuses, but when Finch looks at him, he is smiling into his pillow, half of his face hidden in the soft material.

 

"I assure you, I didn’t." He draws the same figure again. "Hercules on his knees, praying to his father Zeus."

 

"On his knees, you say?"

 

"John," Finch scolds, the small smile on his face betraying him (John’s skin feels almost hot under his palm). "That was terrible."

 

"You don’t pay me for my delightful sense of humor. You pay me to shoot people."

 

"No, John, I pay you to save them," Finch corrects.

 

John turns onto his back, drawing Finch with him, carefully cradling his neck with his hands, keeping the pain that always lingers there at bay.

 

"And I will," he promises, "as long as you keep saving me."

 

* * *

 

Later, Finch will tell John his real name.

 

Later, he will them him why he loves birds.

 

Later, he will bake a cake for John’s birthday and it won’t be lopsided or overbaked.

 

Later, he will let John put his mouth to all of his scars and kiss them better.

 

Later, they will continue saving people.

 

Later, they will continue saving each other.

**Author's Note:**

> I know it might be a little choppy, but it's been on my harddrive for a long time and I really still liked it: Hope you do, too.
> 
> Edit: Thank you more than I can say to WatermelonJuiceGood for translating this into Chinese!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [救赎](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22615282) by [WatermelonJuiceGood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WatermelonJuiceGood/pseuds/WatermelonJuiceGood)




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